Norton Ghost 14.0 [Old Version]

with the Norton Ghost,scheduled to backup weekly to my external hard drive, I dont have to worry about computer crashes and losing all my data and photos.

The only reason I gave Ghost 14 four stars is because during the backup screens you do not see all the partitions on your hard drive in the default configuration. A novice user would not know that other hidden partitions exist on their computer and would probably not backup them. If the purpose of Ghost 14 is to backup an entire computer then the user should see all partitions that exist on their hard disks as the default configuration. Let the user hide any partition as an option since I know hidden partitions are important too. If your hard disk fails you do want everything back including the hidden partitions. In my opinion the menu configurations of Ghost 14 are more complicated than what it needs to be for the average user. Gone are the days of Ghost 2003 when Symantec would allow a home user to backup all his computers at home with a single copy of Ghost. Now we must all purchase one license of Ghost per PC. The only Reason I purchased Ghost 14 was because DELL messed up their bios on my new laptop so Ghost 2003 would not work with their USB ports. Ghost 2003 would allow you to create your own boot CD disks if you knew how to create boot CD disks with Nero and knew how to modify batch files. You were able to boot Ghost from a CD and backup your entire computer to an external/internal drive or burn a CD or DVD backup. Ghost 2003 is still able to backup all my other computers with Windows Vista and Windows XP (32bit and 64bit versions). The Ghost 14 bootable CD only restores images and does not have any backup software available so it behaves like a rescue CD. All backups in Ghosts 14 are conveniently done when logged in to a Windows XP or Windows Vista account unlike Ghost 2003 which requires you to use a bootable CD, USB Drive, or floppy disks.

After wasting two days trying to copy my old hard drive to a new hard drive, I gave up using this tool for that purpose. I think the problem was the new HD was formatted incorrectly to be a bootable drive. The software has a Copy Master Boot Record option, but it never made the drive bootable. This software never tells you the result will not be bootable. Even if it did there is no option to repartition the HD with either Ghost or plain XP options. If you want to migrate your primary HD to a new larger HD, use Acronis Migrate Easy since it is half the price and has the ability to adjust your partitions to be bootable. I think Norton wants this to be purely backup software. As a backup software its buggy. If you have SQL Server installed, you probably run into the COM Surrogate error. I hate the way the software is presumptuous. I didnt need a LiveUpdate in the control panel. Ghost gives you a startup tray app that scans HDs on startup. This slows up the bootup and I dont see how you can turn it off. Since backup software comes with Windows not sure this is worth $70.

After my experience with Ghost v 3.0, I should have known better, but I figured by 14.0 they would have gotten it right. My laptop drops its wireless Internet connection for a few seconds every 15 or 20 minutes - an unsolved problem for many users as a result of yet another piece of crap from Dell. Genie 8.0 does the same thing, but runs the second time. Plus its free. Because Im backing up to a network drive, Ghost just issues an error message and dies. Theres absolutely no tolerance for even a second or two of interruption to the drive connection. So now Im trying to back up using a direct hard-wire connection to the router. It goes along fine, then suddenly it ejects the Ghost disk and says it cant write to it. Huh? Why would it try to write to the Ghost CD? It says insert writeable media. So I take out the Ghost disk and put in a blank. It says writing tracks. Then it ejects the disk with an error and dumprep locks up the cpu for 20 minutes. I put it back in and it sits there for a few hours. Finally I cancel. The disk has nothing on it, but its ruined and cant be rerecorded. I try again. Same thing.

The reviews say it works with Windows 7, but dont believe it. After a reboot it did try to finish, but I wouldnt trust the program on Windows 7.

I used a prior version of ghost to clone a hard drive in the past and it worked. I bought the 14.0 version and the support site provides a guide (Document # 2008011103205462) for performing the disk to disk transfer. I wanted to clone my old 200gb IDE drive to a western digital 1 tb SATA drive. Ghost did not function as advertised. Ghost could not find the destination drive. Long story short, I downloaded Western Digitals version of TRUE IMAGE from WD website and it did a PERFECT job! Save your money by buying a WD drive and download the cloning software for free.

Having used earlier versions of this product in corporate environments, this was almost too simple to use. Perhaps the help files could have a staged method of use (ie: geeks really dont need the detail offered in some pages.) Probably the only thing I would wish for is compression so that an image of 50Gb would not be 50Gb. Highly recommended. (Unless things are PERFECT, I never give the fifth start!) 8^)

works

I seldom use this product since and switched to another online provider

I bought this in order to clone my old disk drive when I replaced it with a larger one. Unfortunately Ghost assigned a different drive letter to the new disk, making it impossible to simply swap the disk drives as all the software was looking for drive C, rather than drive G as Ghost had named the new drive. Norton Ghosts Indian Tech Support was available by internet chat only unless I wanted to pay $1 per minute for telephone support... The Indian support rep had NO idea what to do, and did not seem to understand the term clone, and after consulting his/her computerized telephone script screens finally told me to contact Microsoft for further support. I returned Ghost as defective to the vendor and got a full refund on this useless, unsupported software. While researching Ghost problems on the net, I discovered that you can download a free copy of Acronis from Seagate, the manufacturer of my new drive. It could not have been easier to install and run the software. It cloned my old drive onto the the new drive, and I was able to instantly swap the drives with no interruptions in functionality. Note that Seagates free version of Acronis will search for at least one Seagate drive on your system in order to run. If it does not find a Seagate, youll be prompted to buy the license, but in my case, it had no trouble detecting the new drive connected to a USB port. Im very grateful to Seagate for including such a great tool at no additional charge with their drives!